Dignified care also in schools: why school nursing cannot wait. In the last legislature, with María Dolores Corujo at the head of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, we demonstrated that it could be done: we launched a school nursing pilot with 100% island funding in Tías, Tinajo, and San Bartolomé. Now it is up to the Government of the Canary Islands to comply with the unanimous mandate of Parliament and deploy it on all the islands.
The 2025/2026 school year has begun, and we still see no real progress. In June, the Parliament of the Canary Islands unanimously approved a Non-Law Proposal to promote school nursing. However, to this day, not a single specific position has been appointed, and the Canary Islands maintains just 22 professionals for more than 1,300 centers and more than 250,000 students. These are not cold figures: they are boys and girls with first and last names; teachers who assume responsibilities that do not correspond to them, without resources or health training; families who experience the classroom with uncertainty when there are chronic pathologies, severe allergies, or support needs.
School nursing is not a luxury. It is a policy of dignified care applied to everyday life: prevention, health education, response to emergencies, monitoring of chronic diseases, mental health, affective-sexual education, coordination with Primary Care. It is equal opportunities, also in remote neighborhoods and in towns, and it is peace of mind for those who educate and those who learn.
In Lanzarote, we are not starting from scratch. In the last legislature, under the presidency of María Dolores Corujo, the Cabildo launched a pilot project financed 100% with island resources. We chose Tías, Tinajo, and San Bartolomé because they were already adhering to the Canary Islands Strategy of Health-Promoting Islands and Municipalities. Many of their centers were also part of the Health Promotion and Emotional Education Axis of the Canary Islands Innovas Network. They had a health culture and wanted to go further. That experience left something more than headlines: it left protocols, it left real coordination between teaching and health teams, and it left evidence that the model works, improves the school climate, and reduces risks.
Why then do we not move forward? Because when care is not at the center of the agenda, it slides to the margins. The shameful data on dependency, waiting lists, delays, endless procedures, and the lack of support from educational assistants in too many centers paint the same pattern: what the public system should guarantee is delegated to families and teachers. It cannot be. Care is not improvised or outsourced based on goodwill: it is planned, endowed, and evaluated. We are asking to comply with what was agreed upon and to honor a simple idea: care is a right, not a favor. And, furthermore, it pays off: every crisis avoided, every preventable decompensation, every early intervention in mental health saves suffering and also resources.
From Lanzarote, we already paved the way with the leadership of María Dolores Corujo. We demonstrated that school nursing fits in, adds value, and improves the lives of the educational community. Now it is up to the Government of the Canary Islands to do what is expected: to move from words to action. If not now, when? If not in schools, where?
Because that's what useful politics is about: ensuring a mother doesn't have to ask for permission at work to go and give an urgent injection; ensuring a guardian doesn't have to decide, alone, what to do in the event of an epileptic seizure; ensuring a girl with diabetes lives her day normally; ensuring severe allergies are managed safely; ensuring mental health ceases to be a taboo and finds professionals who also attend to it from the classroom.
School nursing is the missing piece for the right to education and the right to health to go hand in hand. Complying with the PNL is not just completing a formality: it is complying with the childhood of the Canary Islands.
